Electronic social networking is a popular way for individuals to communicate with one another. Social networking web sites allow users to connect for various personal, professional and common interests. Electronic social networking systems are dependent upon users connecting to and identifying other individuals within the social network as “friends,” those individuals with whom they are willing to share greater access to personal information than non-friends. A person's identified friends are sometimes maintained in a “buddy list.”
Most social networking systems include some mechanism for allowing users to find “friends” within the social network. One example of such a friend finding mechanism uses contact lists and performs an e-mail search query, inviting users to upload addresses, search for names, or access address books run by popular e-mail services, after which the system attempts to match the user addresses with other network members. If addressees in the user's contact list are not members of the network, an opportunity to invite the addressee is provided. Other algorithms identify “friends of friends,” or network members which are connected to one's own friends within the social network.
Traditional social-network applications operate based on the personal contact or buddy list of the users in the system. As users interact with each other, they may add new contacts into their personal contact list. The social network application then tries to expand the user's social network by providing suggestions for common friends and “friends of friends” based on their personal contact list. More advanced social networks may try to derive groups of contacts based on common aspects like their education or hobbies that are stored in the contact list so that users can explore the social network using one of these dimensions.
In a corporate and enterprise environment, social network applications have been limited to the most traditional contact list. Providing additional dimensions to explore the social network has generally failed because of security and privacy considerations. For those reasons, corporate social networks have been limited to the personal interactions between single corporate users.